Information Security

The Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday approved two companion bills that would require businesses and government agencies to notify individuals of security breaches involving sensitive personally identifiable information. Both bills go to the Senate for consideration.

Charges were unsealed in federal court in Massachusetts against an Oregon man and the company he founded, TCNISO, alleging that they developed and distributed products that allowed users to modify their cable modems and obtain internet access without paying for it.

A longstanding debate in Web application security, heck all of application security, is which software testing methodology is the best -- that is -- the best at finding the most vulnerabilities. Is it black box (aka: vulnerability assessment, dynamic testing, run-time analysis) or white box (aka: source code review, static analysis)? Some advocate that a combination of the two will yield the most ...

Have you heard the news? The Whitehouse has decided to go open source. They have decided to switch from their own proprietary in-house CMS system to Drupal. You heard me right, Drupal. The same Drupal with 12 pages of vulnerabilities at OSVDB since it’s inception. I’m sure this made the Open Source community jump for joy, but I see this as a big mistake if you take it on face value and...

Programming errors on a website that helps commuters carpool to work are exposing sensitive information of workers for hundreds of employers in Southern California, including at least one military installation.

I’ve long been interested in spam and robots that scrape for email addresses. I’ve done tons of work in the space, although I’ve never published any of it. Call it more of a side hobby than anything I really want to go public with - as it is with a lot of my research

Chris Cooper of Bloomberg.com reports that Digital Direct, Inc., a unit of Mitsubishi Corp., had a breach of their e-commerce web site that resulted in the compromise of 52,000 customers’ credit card numbers.

Starting with the upcoming releases of Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14, Mozilla will warn users if their version of the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin is out of date. Old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a significant security risk.

Ten of Application Security industry's coolest, most interesting, important, and entertaining links from the past week -- in no particular order. Regularly released until year end. Then the Best of Application Security 2009 will be selected!

Because many Oracle customers with responsibility for deploying the Critical Patch Update within their respective organizations will be attending Oracle OpenWorld on October 11-15, 2009; the October 2009 Critical Patch Update originally scheduled to be published on Tuesday, October 13th 2009, will be released on October 20th 2009.

In an effort to determine which sites are safe to visit, security, storage and systems management solutions provider Symantec (www.symantec.com) has identified the “Dirtiest websites of Summer 2009,” a list of the 100 most threatening sites that try to deceive visitors, steal their information or crash their computer.

Last week, the Daily Press reported that a former part-time computer help desk technician at Thomas Nelson Community College claimed that he had been laid off almost three weeks earlier, but that he still had computer access to the records and Social Security numbers of every student in the Virginia Communit...

Gary McGraw (Cigital) published his Software Security annual revenue numbers for 2008. By combining software security tools, Software-as-a-Service providers, and professional services it comes really close to a half billion dollars.